Fay Dewry: Support customers our customers

Cactus Worldwide was created in 1998 and has since become a leading language training company worldwide.

Fay Drewry, Managing Director at Cactus Worldwide, has agreed to answer our questions and share with us the many benefits of learning a language across all age groups.

Hi Fay! Could you give us an overview of Cactus Worldwide?

Cactus Worldwide is made up of four departments: Cactus Language (immersion courses abroad and language holidays for people who are looking to combine an experience with language-learning), Cactus TEFL (teacher training), Cactus corporate language training (tailor-made corporate language training and private tuition for companies and individuals) and evening language courses in the UK (face-to-face evening language courses across the UK and online).

Your audience is very wide: adults, teenagers, office workers, etc. What is your target market? How would you describe your audience?

We cater to everybody or at least try! For Cactus language immersion courses, we target all ages, from parents looking to enroll their children to summer camps and language programs, to students looking to pass an exam abroad (mostly IELTS for English). It includes those wishing to learn a language out of personal interest or for career purposes, as well as the 50+ age group with a lot of free time and disposable income seeking to do something different and wanting to discover new places and cultures. With the corporate language offer, we mostly target companies and office workers by offering language and cultural training for diverse needs and goals. With regard to evening language courses, our audience is made up of 18 to 80-year-old city dwellers, studying full-time and who have a limited amount of time to learn a language. With all that in mind, we could simply say our audience is huge!

How did you first hear about Gymglish?

Well, it all started when one of your former employees contacted us. Funnily enough, it turns out she had studied at a language school that I managed at the time! Your team explained to us what the partnership involved and how we could work together. We were immediately keen to start working alongside Gymglish.

Could you tell us more about the partnership? What does it mean to Cactus Worldwide?

The partnership started in 2015. Back then, we realized we didn’t offer products that were 100% online and that didn’t involve a tutor. We saw this partnership as a fantastic opportunity, as it would entail working with a like-minded company and provide our customers with a complete language learning solution.

We started by offering both Gymglish (English lessons) and Frantastique (French lessons), and promoted them on our three main websites (immersion courses, evening language courses and corporate training). We saw a good level of interest from the start, which grew as we included promotion of the courses across our social media pages and on our eshots. We began with a one-month free promotion that helped people get onboard, and from there, retention rate was high, which meant our customers were keen to continue their language learning journey.

This year, we added two new Gymglish language courses to our offer with Hotel Borbollón (Spanish) and Wunderbla (German) which helps meet our customers’ needs even more!

As a matter of fact, I tried out Frantastique myself and loved it! Being a former language and teacher trainer, I have an academic background and I’m quite critical with pedagogy. I found the course was really engaging and made you want to keep going. Learning goals are clear from the start and I believe that facilitates progress. This was actually a key reason we chose to partner with Gymglish.

How do Gymglish and Cactus Worldwide complement each other?

Gymglish courses are complementary to what Cactus Worldwide already offers, and provide our potential customer base with an additional option should they not be in a position to take our courses. Both time and budget are at stake: someone who is able to spend 20 minutes learning something online is very different from someone wanting to travel and to learn a language. Of course, some people are willing to take both courses, but in most cases, Gymglish helps fill a gap for those unable to take our courses, but still wish to dedicate some time to language learning.

At the end of the day, it’s all about supporting our customers’ language learning journey. We are fully aware that mastering a foreign language is a challenge and can take years. In order to reach that level of fluency, they are bound to try a variety of ways to learn, whether it be face-to-face courses, immersion programs or online courses. Above all, we want to show our customers that if they wish to study a foreign language, there is a budget-friendly way to do so, with a level of personalization that is hard to find on other language learning apps.

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“At the end of the day, it’s about supporting our customers’ language learning journey.” Fay Drewry, Gymglish Partner